Long time

This was supposed to be a journal of my journey but there is no journey, just an almost constant level of frustration.  There is no moving forward.  My husband and I have decided to open our relationship so he can experience intimacy with a real female.  Technically it's open on my end but who the hell would I find who could see me for who I really am?

I have a lump in my breast.  I've read online that whatever it is, it is unlikely to be cancerous.  I have found that it is completely impossible to find the number for the breast screening clinic.  You wouldn't think that it would be that hard.  I have mixed feelings.  I know that if I had to have a mastectomy there is no way that I could have reconstruction done or wear a prosthesis.  Well, it's not even a bridge I have to think about burning at this point I guess.


I've been working on overcoming my depression.  I heard on the radio that not daydreaming is the key to happiness.   I can really see that.  I've been trying to keep my mind occupied.  So far rock band and cleaning seem to be the best way to do it.  It's working a little bit, hard to keep up though.  I sure hope that I can.

Effeminate

I wonder if I am effeminate enough that I could completely be myself and not have anyone even bat an eyelash?   Not to the point of wearing women's clothing, I just can't do that anymore at all.  Funny how things progress.  Two years ago I could wear skirts and I didn't even think about it.  Now I get nauseous just thinking about it.  I honestly don't get that. 

Sometimes things like that make me think that it is all just in my mind.  I've been playing a character for so long I worry that this new me is just another character.  Everything seems to be changing so organically, some things I don't mind, others I'm not sure of. 

I wish that I could put on a dress.  I have to go to a friend's wedding and I have no idea what I'm going to wear.  I can't go in men's dress clothes.  The friend's soon to be husband knows people who know my husband and she's from work and I'm going with someone else from work and it would be really, really bad.  So, I'm not putting on a dress but I'll be wearing a women's blouse and I'll be the character once again.  It is so hard not being out.  And I can't see coming out any time soon.  The closest I ever come is telling people that I'm not a girly girl.

Inbetweener

I've been feeling sad and frustrated lately.  I masturbated to gay porn for the first time the other night and cried afterwords.  My gender seems to be the elephant in the room between my husband and I.  We allude to it sometimes but we rarely ever talk about it.  I worry that I can't be the woman that he wants me to be and I can't be the man I want to be.  I wouldn't mind some appreciation for the sacrifice that I feel I am making for my family.  I'm not convinced that I would pursue hormones or SRS even if they were not in the picture, but the option would be there at least.

A friend told me that I am her best friend today.  I don't feel like her best friend because I have this secret from her.  It is so hard for me to talk to anyone about it.  Thank god for the internet.  I also have the opportunity to meet a trans or trans-friendly person in the local area.  Honestly, I am terribly frightened that my trans feelings will be confirmed by others and then I will really want to transition.

I'm afraid that this life that I have would not be enough anymore if someone accepted me for who I am.  This whole thing is just so steeped in fear for me.  The major fear of my mother finding out has been lifted but it seems to have been replaced by so many others.

Everything to lose

My level of frustration is very high right now.  My goal a while ago was to meet people that I could be out to.  Now I have pulled back from that and although the urge to be out is very high, I'm afraid of what meeting people and having people accept me might lead to.  I can have a chance at happiness and royally screw up two people's lives or I can live with this frustration.  I wonder if it is even possible to be actually happy like this?  I try not to even think about transition, but it is hard not to.  Would I lose my hair if I went on T?  Would I get chest and maybe even back hair?  What would my chest look like without breasts?  How would people treat me if I tried to live as a man where I am so effeminate?  Would the guy I flirt with at work punch me in the face?  Sometimes I feel like my life is made up entirely of impossible dreams.

Confidence?

Several (many?) years ago, when I was only occasionally flirting with the idea that I might be transgendered, I gave a speech at a benefit dinner and auction.  People were amazed at my confidence.  I have had people comment on my confidence since and it thoroughly confuses me.  I have most of the same insecurities that most of the people I know do.  I think that it might be my masculinity emerging.  I think that it took a lot of energy to not be myself, and as I let me be myself as much as I can, then I can focus my energy on other things.  I'm not really sure how it works, but I like me more now.

Sometimes I wish I was a lesbian

I don't know if lesbian is the right term, where I feel like I'm male.  I guess sometimes I wish that I were attracted only to women.  If I were then I would have to enter the GBLT community in order to find a relationship, or at least that would be the most likely place to find one.  Also it might give me an opportunity to talk to people about my sexuality and gender identity. This is just a thought experiment.  I could be completely wrong.

Question 1

The following is a question by Madeline H. Wyndzen to help explore transgenderism. 

Imagine you could start life over, right from the moment you were born. Knowing everything you know now, you get to choose which sex you are born. What choice would you make? Why did you make that choice? What might be better about your life as the sex you chose? What might be worse about your life as the sex you chose? 

This question really got me because I haven't had the best life ever.  It's pretty good now, but it hasn't always been.  Also I find that a shrinks diagnoses of me wanting to be someone else has clouded my thoughts on my gender for a very long time.  If I chose to have been born the boy I feel I am, which is gay and somewhat effeminate, I doubt that my young life in the 70's and 80's would have been very pleasant.  On the other had, it is likely that I would have escaped the sexual abuse that happened to me on two occasions. 

Being transgendered led to depression and frustration until I knew what I was.  Even as a teen, knowing who I was for a short time, faced with leaving friends and family behind at the prospect of living my life as I felt it should be lived filled me with fear and apprehension at the same time as it filled me with hope.  Then 20-odd "lost years" while I was trying to be a female, during which I had no direction or ambition and almost no will of my own.  After my son was born, I got my act together a bit, but that was for another person, not myself.  Now I live with frustration and confusion.  I feel like I have a secret and no one really knows me.  I think that I would prefer to have lived my life without that if I didn't know about this life because I could not give up my son and husband for anything.

Isolation and frustration

My mother died just over 5 months ago.  My transgendered feelings have become much more intense since then.  I belong to a forum and someone on there posted to me that sometimes we keep secrets for other people and I think that is the case with me.  The only people that I was really worried about finding out about my gender were my mother and my aunt, who died a month ago.  I realize now how I have isolated myself.  My mother was my only social contact outside of my home.  We talked at least a couple times a day.  Now I would really like to reach out but I have no idea how.

When I started to try to be a girl in my late teens I developed a fear of the queer community.  The last thing that I wanted to do was meet someone like me who was happy and well adjusted.  I feel kind of bad about that because a friend of mine reached out to me to go with him to a group for young GBLTs and I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  He was pretty messed up and ended up much worse over time.  Now I want to reach out and I have no idea how to do it, or how I might be accepted.  I have one friend and I'm afraid to come out to that person because I don't know how discrete she would be and we work together.  Also some of the people I have come out to in the past have worked really hard to put me back the way I was, or flat out have not believed me.

My isolation has lead to frustration.  I really want to have friends who I am out to and accept me, but I don't know how to reach out.  Funny, I was thinking today that the way I am feeling now, the bursting frustration, is the same was I felt leading up to coming out to my mom.  I don't want to make the wrong move, I don't want to come out to the wrong person and make trouble for myself or my family or ruin a friendship.  Unfortunately, my frustration has leaked out into my job satisfaction and my parenting.  I don't know what to do.  I asked a social worker for help but she got nowhere.  Someone mentioned a group in Ontario that I might contact.  It is very far away but I have to do something.  I could cause myself considerable damage in my present state.

Why I don't transition

Hmmmmm.....  Well there are a bunch of reasons for me to not transition.  Any one on their own might not be enough, but added together they make a convincing reason, for me anyway.  Not that there aren't times that I think about it. 

If I could have transitioned when I was a teen or young adult I think that I would have jumped at the chance.  I've had over 20 years of fitting in with the female world.  I worry that if I tried to pass all the time (or at all for that matter)  I would be constantly thinking of my behavior and whether or not I fit in and am doing it right.  Also I am quite effeminate.  Not drag queen effeminate, but getting there I suppose.  Females absolutely confound me, but to be honest, guys do too.  I don't know if that is normal or not for someone in my position, I'm not in contact with anyone else in my position.

Also I have my family to consider.  My husband is straight and although he is dealing with this the best he can, he is straight and would not stay with me if I transitioned.  I really love him and he is good for me in so many ways I would not want to lose him.  I have a preteen son.  We live in a working class neighborhood and I wouldn't want to make his Jr. high school years worse for him because his friends might think that he has a freak for a mother.

I have short hair and my boobs are not huge but big and I never, ever, ever pass at all.  I prefer to wear sports bras to smoosh things down a bit, but that feels like too much clothes, I can't imagine what wearing a binder would be like.  I've also heard that I would have to wear more clothes over a binder to hide it.  I have a sweating problem already and have to dress light all the time.

Lastly, fear.  I'm afraid of how things would go.  There are some effects of hormone treatments are permanent.  What if I changed my mind?  I'm afraid that I would go bald if I had hormone treatment.  Also I can flirt with men now and not worry about being punched in the face.

Me, in a nutshell

Help, help, I'm in a nutshell.  Would that make me king of infinite space?  Okay, normal now.

A little background on who I am and why I'm starting this blog.  I'm 42 years old, I have a husband and son and I've realized or rerealized over the past year that I am FTM transgendered.  That is, I have a female body but I feel like I'm a male person. 

 I've spent some time trying to remember my childhood, looking for signs.  Other than confusion when I played you show me yours and I'll show you mine with a neighbor girl and finding it weird that we looked the same "down there", insisting to my mom that I be allowed to go shirtless and walking in on my brother in the bath and finding it weird that he looked different "down there" I haven't been able to find much.  I always had a feeling that there was something wrong though.  I dreaded my period and was prayed every day that I wouldn't get it, I was devastated when it came.

When I was 16 or so, I was home alone wandering around the house feeling, well I'm not sure how to describe it, unfulfilled maybe?  It dawned on me to go downstairs where my brother had left some clothes when he moved out.  I found a hideous corduroy suit that he had left behind when he moved out and went back upstairs to try it on.  I looked in the mirror and saw myself, I think for the first time.  I was excited but wary and confused too. 

After a while I told my shrink that I thought that I would prefer to be a boy. He got pretty excited too.  Looking back I think that he figured he could get a paper out of me.  He told me not to tell my parents but I did tell some of my friends and they were really cool about it.  That was a long time ago and there weren't supports or the internet like there is now.  I felt really alone, but I was pretty much living as a boy and enjoying life as much as I could.

My shrink's thought was that I would move to Toronto and leave my family and friends behind and go to the Clark Institute, which was treating transsexuals (that was the term used then) back then.  The impression that he gave me was that I couldn't keep the same friends that I had and my family would reject me.  Very scary thoughts for a 16 year old, well 17 by then.  I had a really hard time keeping it from my family and finally I came out to my mom.  She was really, really, really mad, I mean really.  She told me years later that her first thought was to put us both in the car and drive us over a cliff.

It was a very tense couple of months.  My dad kind of came around and looked into treatments for me, mostly treatments that made me stay a girl.  My mom talked to a lawyer and my doctor and planned a lawsuit (again I didn't find this out until a couple of years ago).  They sent me to the transsexual specialist in my small city for an interview.  This guy was my key to getting treatment (sex change, they called it then).  It was the strangest hour of my life.  This guy asked me a slew of questions but I don't remember him looking at me once.  At the end of the hour he declared that I was not transsexual, I just wanted to be someone else. Of course with a lawsuit over his head, who could blame him, but I didn't know that was going on in the background.  My original shrink left the country.

I was so upset, I didn't know what to think.  I had a long walk/bus ride home, and all I could think about was who I could possibly be, if this someone else that I wanted to be felt so much like me.  When I got home and told my mom, she was delighted.  Everyone was happy except me.  I was confused. 

The whole experience left me with thinking that others knew who I was better than I did.  I went about trying to be a girl, but because of these feelings I didn't have any direction.  If someone wanted to have sex with me, it must mean that I wanted to have sex with them.  Over the years I tended to isolate myself.  I was very plain-Jane.  I had someone tell me once that I should dress much cooler than I did given my personality.

About 8 or 9 years ago my transgendered feelings started to resurface.  I had got myself into an abusive relationship and discussed it with my counselor at the housing I was staying in.  I don't present as very male, to tell you the truth.  I came out to a friend and she said that there was absolutely nothing male about me because she wasn't afraid of me.  I squashed the feelings down and tried to be a girl again, but every once in awhile the feelings would come back.  I moved on and found a better man.  Two years ago the feelings came back again.  My husband and I talked about it and I figured that it was just that my original shrink had somehow convinced me that I was transgendered and I had some kind of residual confusion.  But the feelings came back again when my mother because terminally ill.  I think that knowing that she would not be around made me feel safe enough to allow those feelings to resurface.  Not that I didn't love my mom, other than what happened when I came out to her, we had a really good relationship.  When my husband found out that I was looking at transgendered and queer websites looking for help, he flipped.  That was almost a year ago or so.  We are still together and I'm struggling my way though how I feel.  I imagine that he is too.